Affirmation (The Guardian)

Although she is one of the UK's most consistently successful R&B singers, Beverley Knight has never parlayed her dozen or so hit singles into significant album sales, for which her manifestly English cosiness is partly to blame.
So she has called in Robbie Williams's songwriter, Guy Chambers, who co-wrote four of the songs on Affirmation, including the single Come As You Are. Initial signs are encouraging: Knight has rarely been in more walloping voice, and crunches into the rip-roaringly rocky single like a tigress.

Chambers' eerie, reverb-heavy Affirmation is another blockbuster moment, and his Under the Same Sun features Knight at her most delicate. These tracks, plus one or two others, are just the sort of radio-savvy growers that Knight has hitherto lacked, and while they mark a move away from the Britsoul that made her name, she may yet find a new identity as England's Anastacia.

3/5

The Guardian

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